Where in Heaven and Hell and Eastern Europe Was Nosferatu Filmed?

Aidan Monaghan/Focus Features

To create the dreadful world of Nosferatu, production designer Craig Lathrop designed and built some 60 sets in Prague, many of them based on real places in Germany and Transylvania. Lathrop, a longtime collaborator of writer and director Robert Eggers, spent nine months in Prague between preparing and filming. During this time, he took a few trips around the Baltic Coast and to Romania, to scout haunted castles (not to be confused with Germany’s beautiful castles) for the home of vampire Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). After Lathrop and Eggers saw numerous sites, they settled on Romania’s Corvin Castle for the exterior and Pernštejn Castle in the Czech Republic for the courtyard. Everything else was constructed.

“Most of what you see on screen, I built,” Lathrop says. “We built the interiors of the castle. We built all of the streets of the city. I built the monastery chapel with all of the frescos. The only interior we didn’t build was the hospital.”

The film, a retelling of 1922 silent German Expressionist Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, centers on the supernatural connection between undead Count Orlok and a haunted young woman named Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). After Ellen marries Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), a real estate agent in the fictional German town of Wisborg, Orlok lures Thomas to Transylvania to help him move there himself. His arrival unleashes a plague on the peaceful seaside enclave, a cover for horrors untold. Here Lathrop discusses the inspirations behind Nosferatu’s sets and the historical research that went into it.

Why was Corvin Castle right for Count Orlok’s home?

The first images I saw of Corvin Castle, a few years ago, looked fantastic because it was falling apart. It was decaying. But after those photos were taken, they did a huge renovation and it was beautiful. We liked the look of it better than Bran Castle. There is also thought that maybe it was Corvin Castle that Bram Stoker had seen images of [for inspiration].

Was it important for the castle to feel inherently unnerving?

Yes, and that’s why we ended up building it. We saw a lot of beautiful castles, but they were all beautiful in the wrong way. They were cleaned up and spit-shined and ready for tourists to walk through. Or they were complete ruins with no ceiling and half the walls coming down. There wasn’t anything that had this great decay and this crumbling feeling of Orlok’s castle. This is a count who has been in his sarcophagus for the last couple 100 years. Orlok himself is decaying and looks deceased. I wanted his environment to reflect that.

How did you design the sarcophagus?

I [was inspired by] a 15th-century sarcophagus from Poland. Orlok is Dacian so I started looking at Dacian dragons. Trajan’s Column in Rome shows the battle of the Romans defeating the Dacians and you see their Dacian dragon, which has a wolf’s head, so I started adding wolves’ heads. The feet of the casket are actually Dacian dragons. We came up with a coat of arms for Orlok to put on and added Solomonic symbols. The idea is that the more you stack up the details, the more you’re creating the world.

How would you describe that atmosphere in general?

It depends where you are in the story. A good example is the streets of Wisborg. The first time we see Wisborg it’s a bustling, robust port town with this specific architecture you find on the Baltic coast. Once the plague hits, I boarded up the walls and we stripped the color away to make it more dreary. The snow is falling and they’re dragging bodies through the streets.

Was Wisborg inspired by real German cities?

It’s a collage of places. Lübeck is the one I used the most. In the wide shot of Wisborg, with the help of visual effects, you can see I picked a lot of buildings from that town. The church with the spire, the famous gate, a bunch of the houses—we scanned those from Lübeck. I looked at a lot of those Hanseatic towns during my research and then I scouted some along the Baltic coast in Germany. There are some amazing towns there. The problem for us was that they had been destroyed and rebuilt several times. And the historic parts are cleaned up and used as tourists attractions, which was less useful for this movie.

Is it true that you used real rats during the plague scenes?

We used about 5,000 real rats. We had real rats on the streets [of Wisborg]. What you don’t see, because we were clever about it, is the Plexiglass walls that were keeping the rats in a safe area on the set. Behind them, on the other side of the walls, would be the horses. We erased the edges with visual effects. In the chapel scene, we used a combination of rats and effects. In the foreground, the rats were real. But then I built what we called “rat mats,” which were half meter square molds of a bunch of rats climbing all over each other. Visual effects animated more rats on top of those. So we only had 5,000, but it looks like we had hundreds of thousands.

Did you draw on the original Nosferatu or any previous Dracula films in your design?

I suppose I was always drawing on them because the story is based off those and I was trying to fulfill the needs of the story. But I didn’t take anything directly. There’s a scene in the 1922 where the characters are at the beach and there’s a bunch of crosses to people who had died at sea and I did recreate that, although it’s not an exact recreation. But I wanted it to be similar. We actually built that on a lake in the Czech Republic and brought in a bunch of sand. We were looking at going to the North Sea to do it, but we had to be fiscally responsible.

Was there anywhere you visited in Prague or the Czech Republic that inspired your designs?

There’s a carriage museum in Čechy pod Kosířem that was beautiful. We rented a beautifully-carved Roma wagon there, but the whole place was really inspiring. Another location we used in Prague was the Olšany Cemetery where we built the mausoleum and the grave sites around it, but I also recommend the Old Jewish Cemetery. It’s absolutely breathtaking. Speculum Alchemiae is a museum about alchemy and it’s an amazing little spot. If you look in the apartment we built for Albin Eberhart Von Franz [played by Willem Dafoe], I used a lot of what I learned there.

Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler

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